Monday, June 06, 2011

Now that I'm sort of weakly trying to revive my brief training in philosophy, I decided I should read the Tractatus at last, and was pleased to find that it's very short. This is my favourite statement so far:

"4.463The truth-conditions of a proposition determine the range that it leaves open to the facts.

(A proposition, a picture, or a model is, in the negative sense, like a solid body that restricts the freedom of movement of others, and, in the positive sense, like a space bounded by solid substance in which there is room for a body.)

A tautology leaves open to reality the whole – the infinite whole – of logical space: a contradiction fills the whole of logical space leaving no point of it for reality. Thus neither of them can determine reality in any way."

One imagines a series of spaces like rooms along a corridor – some airless vacuums, others filled all the way up to the doorway with solid concrete, most in between. Hotel Borges?

Also:

"5.511 How can logical – all-embracing logic, which mirrors the world – use such peculiar crochets and contrivances (Haken und Manipulationen)? Only because they are all connected with one another in an infinitely fine network, the great mirror."